What is your favourite positive argument for atheism/unbelief?

[emjay]

@Rik. As Lucanus said, if that's the case, how do you explain how brain damage etc effects consciousness?

Been there done that Em.
If you look in the .......What is logic?.....thread at page 22 you will find my answer.  

So, this?

Easy explained Luc.
When you drive your car and you get involved in an accident you car get smashed and most of the time you too get injured.
The consciousness being an abstract entity can not really get damaged but because is stuck inside the
pineal gland and the brain when the brain get damaged the consciousness that rely on the brain as his source of energy can not work properly that is why .............can result in severely altered states of consciousness........ as you say.

So your answer is that a random/arbitrary location in the brain contains consciousness and the rest just supplies it with energy? And then that damage to anywhere in that 'source of energy' just causes random/vague altered states of consciousness? And you're happy with that level of vagueness?

I'd never be happy with that level of vagueness; given a clear connection between matter (the brain) and mind (consciousness) that even you admit in the form of 'source of energy' that when disrupted... 'smashed'... causes 'severely altered states of consciousness', I would want to know why and how that was the case. I would want to know why any particular area of the brain should be considered the seat of consciousness... you've chosen the pineal gland... why that in particular? A better candidate would be the claustrum if you're looking to localise consciousness like that:

Consciousness on-off switch discovered deep in brain | New Scientist

Personally, I don't believe consciousness can be localised like that to a particular area of the brain. I believe it's represents a whole, dynamic network, and therefore under that view the claustrum would be more akin to a switchboard interconnecting several neural networks of the brain, and that if disrupted, disrupts the integration of those areas and therefore affects consciousness. But that's just my opinion.

And I would want to know what particular altered states of consciousness, and even normal states of consciousness, were associated with damage/stimulation of which areas of the brain. And that's one of the things neuroscience investigates. Without it you would not have drugs and brain surgery that predictably affect consciousness, such as to reduce pain with painkillers. How do you explain how the conscious experience of pain can be reduced not only from the inside... through meditation, hypnosis etc... but also from the outside by manipulating the brain through drugs and/or surgery? Neuroscience may never be able to answer the ultimate question of why/how there is a correlation between mind and matter, but the fact that there is a correlation is something that cannot be disputed, even apparently by you. In the end, it's inability to answer that question doesn't matter because by progressive investigation of these correlations (ie neuroscience), the mind can be mapped from the outside through its correlation with matter (ie the brain) which can be mapped. So in a few hundred years, though we may be no closer to answering the philosophical questions of what consciousness is and why/how it relates to matter, we will still have made a lot of progress in mapping the mind and it's dynamics, such that even if we don't know why a given state of consciousness takes a particular form (or even why it has a form... qualia... in the first place) we can still predict that that particular form will be present given a certain state of the brain. So from that perspective, neuroscience is beautiful... it can elucidate the workings of the mind even if it never touches that question (ie the mind/body problem), leaving the hypothetical theist soul less and less place to hide.

Given that even you admit a connection between mind and matter... the pineal gland and the energy that supplies it, what's to say that the NDE's that you're so fond of mentioning aren't exactly that... in your terms, a disruption to the energy that supplies the pineal gland, that results in a 'severely altered state of consciousness', and in my terms, a severely altered state of consciousness that results from the damage/disruption caused by a dying brain?